In November 1617, Protestants across the Holy Roman Empire commemorated the one-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Traditionally, scholars have argued that a unity of message marked the first official centennial celebration in modern Western history. Equally important, however, were variations in the structure of Reformation Jubilee commemorations, which authorities...

Despite Tridentine efforts to curtail family influence and interference in convents through the enforcement of strict enclosure and regulation of their governance, families of the civic, feudal, and papal aristocracy in seventeenth century Rome maintained close ties with their relatives in the city’s female convents, institutions which played a central role in strategies of the Counter- ...

This article examines questions of retributive justice and conflict resolution in early modern England. In particular, it focuses on Protestant demands for anti-Catholic vengeance in the aftermath of the Marian persecution. Following the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, some godly critics called for the execution of the Marian leadership, whom they blamed for the deaths of the Protestant ...

The purpose of this article is to reconsider the combat efficiency and motivation of the Spanish infantry during the Italian Wars in light of the unfounded and misguided conclusions of both sixteenth-century and present-day perceptions of professional and mercenary soldiers. The humanistic admiration of the citizen-soldier embedded a fundamental fear and suspicion of the supposedly ...

This article examines the early modern reception history of a Hebrew epitome of Josephus Flavius’s Antiquities originally composed by the Jewish historian and philosopher Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo. Circulating in Latin, English, and German, Protestant printers and editors in particular regarded this work as a concise and accessible alternative to the Antiquities. In their eyes, it represented...

The genesis for this set of essays originated almost sixteen years ago, when the Book Review Office of the Sixteenth Century Journal moved to Roanoke College and began receiving diverse books of Shakespearean scholarship for the purpose of placing, editing, and publishing book reviews of those books. We, the Book Review Editors, have often joked that it would be possible to publish an entire ...

In the modern American humanities classroom (whether it is literature, political science, or history) faculty may find it difficult to construct a framework for the analysis of women’s pan-historical place in power and in medieval and early modern British history, literature, and popular culture. Faculty first confront the core questions (Why should American students care? How do I make this...